Thursday, August 31, 2006

The latest entrant to the crowded Internet browser market is the appropriately named Browzar, a tool specifically designed to protect users' privacy by not retaining details of the Web sites they've searched.

Most Web browsers like Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer automatically save users' searches in Internet caches and histories. Users do have the option of deleting the history folder and emptying the Internet cache, but many people either don't know how to do that or tend not to, leaving a trail of where they've been online behind them in the browser.

Browzar is being officially launched Thursday but can already be run or downloaded from its Web site. Users don't have to register to use the free browser.

Sunday, August 27, 2006

Google doesn't allow you to tweak with the code of the Adsense script that you insert in your website, strictly. But google does allow you to change the color theme of adsense to match your blog template or website theme. Only problem is that google provides only so much color in its adsense customization feature.

What if you theme is of a different color? And the color editor in google adsense doesn't have the color.Also, what if you don't want to login to google adsense and follow the same process, and directly want to change the color in the adsense script itself?You are one of those bloggers who likes to tweak with the templete every now and then?

You don't know the exact color code of the color you are using as a theme. Color code grid will give you a code but that again may not be very accurate. I use colorspy for the same. It is a freeware available for download here. Just drag the dropper on the color you want to know the code of, and then copy it the adsense script.

Just drag the dropper to the background of your blog to get the color of the background and paste that code to color_bg and color_border.

Change color_link to a colour that you are using for hypertext links.

Change the color_text and colour_url to the colour of your text.

That should merge the adsense units with your template very well.

Only Google advises that merging the adsense theme with your template might not be the best way. Google suggest that you use some different color themes so that the adsense units are prominent and people see them.

I think it might be right. I had changed the adsense theme to a very stark and contrasting color and it indeed inproved click through rate by double. I had again changed it to the merged theme andI see that the click through rates havedecreased.

Friday, August 25, 2006

"Software developers who have the ability to create and maintain quality software in a team environment are in high demand in today's technology-driven economy. The number one challenge facing developers working in a team environment is reading and understanding software written by another developer. "

Thursday, August 24, 2006

When Netflix was awarded a patent in April that described the online DVD queue that its subscribers use to prioritize which movies they receive, it was only a matter of time until the inevitable patent infringement lawsuit against its largest competitor, Blockbuster, was filed. Blockbuster shot back with a countersuit, claiming Netflix was illegally trying to monopolize the online rental market.

In the latest chapter of this heated legal battle, a federal judge ruled that Blockbuster's antitrust suit could go forward. Finding that Blockbuster had discovered "potential bad faith" by Netflix, US District Court Judge William Alsup is allowing the suit to proceed in tandem with Netflix's patent-infringement suit.[more at arstechnica]

Apple Computer and Creative Technology have agreed to settle their legal dispute over music player patents for $100 million, the companies announced Wednesday.

The $100 million, to be paid by Apple, grants Apple a license to a Creative patent for the hierarchical user interface used in that company's Zen music players. After months of hinting that it would be coming after rival music player companies, Creative sued Apple in May, claiming the iPod maker was infringing on its patents.

A week later, Apple countersued, claiming Creative was infringing on Apple patents for user interfaces. As a result of the settlement, all legal disputes between the two companies related to the patent will disappear. Creative had also asked the International Trade Commission to investigate Apple for patent infringement.

The patent covers an interface that lets users navigate through a tree of expanding options, such as selecting an artist, then a particular album by that artist, then a specific song from that album, said Phil O'Shaughnessy, a Creative spokesman. The patent applies to portable media players, which includes devices like the iPod or cell phones that have the ability to play music, he said. Creative filed for the patent on Jan. 5, 2001.

Apple can get back some of the $100 million payment if Creative is able to secure licensing deals with other MP3 player manufacturers, said Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesman. He declined to specify exactly how much Apple could recoup or how many deals it would take to trigger the payments. [read more at news.com]

Canon Inc. unveiled a new digital single-lens reflex camera on Thursday that undercut the price of a similar model sold by Sony Corp. in the market for photo enthusiasts.

Canon, the world's top digital camera maker, said it would launch the new entry-level SLR camera globally in September with plans to produce 180,000 units per month. The camera body is priced at about ¥ 90,000 ($775).

The camera, named EOS Kiss Digital X in Japan and Rebel XTi in the United States, will be equipped with a sensor capable of 10.1 megapixels of resolution.

Canon faces a new threat from consumer electronics makers including Sony and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., which have tied up with other camera makers to make inroads into the more profitable SLR market as margins for simpler compact models decline due to price competition.

Sony , which bought the SLR unit of Konica Minolta Holdings, began selling its first digital SLR with a resolution of 10.2 megapixels in July at around ¥ 100,000.

Despite emerging competition, the digital SLR market is still dominated by traditional camera makers such as Canon, which has 70 years of history in the industry. This is the 10th generation of Canon's best-selling EOS Kiss, or Rebel, cameras.

Tokyo-based Canon accounted for 53 percent of the digital SLR market in 2005, followed by another Japanese maker, Nikon Corp., at 28 percent, according to research firm IDC.

"This new model targets customers who had been thinking of switching from film cameras to digital models as well as those who had enjoyed compact cameras or our previous Kiss models," Tomonori Iwashita, the director of Canon's camera unit, told a news conference.

Canon has said it estimates sales of digital SLRs will jump 26 percent to 2.4 million units in 2006 from a year earlier. That would outperform sales growth of compact models, expected to rise 17 percent to 17.6 million units.

Digital SLRs, unlike compact models, use interchangeable lenses. They have more advanced sensors and take better-quality pictures. Canon has sold more than 30 million interchangeable lenses, most of which can be used for both its film and digital cameras.

It was a smarter move than Youtube's Paris Hilton deal, with Video Sites, despite the popularity, are now difficult to fully Monetize, and the cost of running is very high. The bandwidth of Youtube eats up about a Million Dollar every month, though some people think it is worth a Billion Dollars, in which case, the 65 Million seem underpaid, with 8 million unique visitors.

Sony will now have a captive 8 million visitors to show its video collection. Perhaps, Sony will turn out to be the winner and so will Youtube if they can hang on a little longer. Storage space will only get cheaper by the day, so will bandwidth; Broadband will only get broader, and with advance technology in video compression, the videos in Youtube or Grouper will be Divx quality in the near future... Ah!! then Monetization wouldn't be a problem at all...

Video sharing website grouper.com has been bought by film giant Sony Pictures Entertainment for $65m (£34m). The Californian based Grouper claims to be the "second largest independent video community" on the web and allows users to upload, watch and share videos.

It was a smarter move than Youtube's Paris Hilton deal, with Video Sites, despite the popularity, are now difficult to fully Monetize, and the cost of running is very high. The bandwidth of Youtube eats up about a Million Dollar every month, though some people think it is worth a Billion Dollars, in which case, the 65 Million seem underpaid, with 8 million unique visitors.

Sony will now have a captive 8 million visitors to show its video collection. Perhaps, Sony will turn out to be the winner and so will Youtube if they can hang on a little longer. Storage space will only get cheaper by the day, so will bandwidth; Broadband will only get broader, and with advance technology in video compression, the videos in Youtube or Grouper will be Divx quality in the near future... Ah!! then Monetization wouldn't be a problem at all...

Arstechnica Reports;Sometimes high-tech failures call for old-fashioned remedies, which explains why the heads are beginning to roll at AOL headquarters. The corporate guillotine has been wheeled out to deal with the apocalyptic fallout from AOL's infamous decision to release "anonymous" search data on hundreds of thousands of users for research purposes.

The miniature purge kicked out CTO Maureen Govern, who didn't survive a full year at AOL. Govern was brought onboard last September after then-CTO John McKinley was promoted to the top of the AOL Digital Services group. With Govern's departure, McKinley will resume CTO duties on an interim basis.

In addition, the employee who released the data and his supervisor in AOL reSearch were also shown the door. The reSearch site remains inaccessible for the moment, as well.

The damage from the scandal has already been done, meaning that efforts at damage control (such as the company's new privacy policy task force) are largely beside the point. After fierce criticism of the data release on the Internet, AOL could also be in for some regulatory trouble—the EFF recently filed an FTC complaint against AOL for deceptive and unfair trade practices.

With Internet-like speed, blogs have gone from self-indulgent hobbies to flourishing businesses. Real businesses, with real revenue streams from real advertisers, not overhyped next big things. Some of the most popular blogs, long the bane of the mainstream media, are now themselves becoming mainstream. Michael Arrington of Techcrunch makes about 60,000 dollars a month, closer home Amit Aggarwal of Digital Inspiration gave us a sneak peak at his adsense earnings of about a 1000 Dollars in a Particular day.

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the Venture Capital firm that have struck gold with early investments in some stellar VC succeses like Hotmail, Skype and Baidu has been investing on some interesting startups in stealth mode.

Four-month-old Decentral.tv in San Rafael (Calif.) is developing what I will over-simplistically call social networking for television. Founder Daniel Graf calls it interactive Broadcast Broadband Communities, or iBBC. Graf was formerly a senior director at Phillips Consumer Electronics, where he developed the Streamium products and services.

DFJ stealth startup number two is one-year-old Celiro in San Jose (Calif.). It is developing software that personalizes the user experience on cell phones. Founder and CEO Ram Ramkumar was VP of engineering at antispam company MailFrontier, which was also funded by DFJ and sold to SonicWALL in February for $56 million. Celiro raised $540,000 last month in a series A round led by DFJ affiliate Draper Associates. Sean Fee, angel investor and interim marketing VP at Celiro, was formerly VP of marketing at Hotmail, DFJ's famous dot-com era investment. Jim Mansfield, also formerly of Hotmail, recently joined Celiro as marketing VP.[source]

The problem is that the market is growing at less than 10 per cent per year. As more seats keep getting added to the kitty, the players - notably Jet, Sahara and Kingfisher - find themselves unable to extricate themselves from the low-fare game.

Earlier only 10 per cent of seats would be offered on lower fares, now it's perhaps twice as much. At the least. Full-service airlines are in an unusual situation. Their loads could not have been better and their yields worse - so they would rather fly at 70 per cent average passenger load with higher fares rather than the other way round.

The no-frills are caught in their own spiral. Because they are low-fare airlines, not low-cost, as is often pointed out. The cost of fuel, spares, airport infrastructure and crew does not change much. A full-service airline man alleges pilot salaries at some "low-cost" airlines are higher than his. Nothing wrong with that, except that margins for the latter will suffer.

What does this add up to? One industry watcher estimates that this will blow a neat $400 million (Rs 1,800 crore) hole in airlines' balance sheets by the end of next year. Most seem prepared for this but how they will survive this is anybody's guess. Older ones like Jet will hang on, newer ones like Kingfisher will have the advantage of group backing. It's the rest that will face the most pain.

Flying international will help some. Jet, Sahara, and Kingfisher are expanding or trying to. Long-haul revenues, both from passengers and cargo, are good. But going West without being able to fly onto the US is a handicap, as Jet discovered. Nor did it expect British Airways to respond so swiftly with additional London flights. The East is more remunerative, but only comparatively. Not surprisingly, Jet hopes that 50 per cent of its revenues (and presumably more profits) in four to five years will come from international flights.[source]

Yes the market can grow, and you may have noticed that Air Travel no longer is restricted to the rich or upper Middle class, but There never were any frills to cut any more frills. Read this excellent back of the envelop calculation,"Math of Low Cost Flying" by K. Yes, the most profitable Airlines are Low fare Airlines, but we should remember the Red Trails of the US Airlines Industry of the 80's when Accumulated losses wiped out all the profits made by airlines till then. Similarly, in a market where retail margin is lower than 10%, how would low cost retailer survive?

With Yahoo! losing the search war to Google, Yahoo won a battle of sorts. Yahoo has clinched a deal with Orange to bring its online search service to customers of the mobile phone operator. Yahoo! already has a deal with Mobile Operator 3, and this deal will add significantly to it mobile phone search marketshare.

As networks get faster, and the screens on mobile phones become sharper - allowing pared-down web pages to be viewed- major internet players are realising that the next battleground for customers will be on mobile handsets.

There are already more than twice as many mobile phones in the world as there are computers, and the rate of mobile adoption, especially in the developing world, far outstrips the pace of PC sales. Many of the leading dotcom players already have standalone mobile-accessible portals and services.

Yahoo!, for instance, has a mobile version of its portal operating in the UK. But the networks themselves can play a key role in driving traffic.

The key is the power that they have as the first point of contact when mobile users go online on their phones. In the lucrative world of paid-for search advertising, dominated by Google and Yahoo!, this traffic can easily be monetised.

Working directly with a mobile operator also opens up the possibility of tailoring searches to a person's location, something that has long been seen as the holy grail of the mobile web.

Google has already snapped up T-Mobile as a customer, and users of its popular Web 'n' Walk service - which allows customers to browse the internet and gives easy access to personal email via mobiles - are directed straight to Google's home page when they click on the service's icon on their phones. Google has also signed up with Vodafone but the two partners have yet to announce a product.[source]

Monday, August 21, 2006

Social meter scans the major social websites to analyze a webpage's social popularity. Currently they scan Del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Google, Jots, Linkroll, Netscape, Reddit, Shadows, Spurl, Technorati, and Yahoo My Web.

Google's share of the US search market dipped one percent in July to 43.7% after 11 consecutive months of increases. 2nd ranked search site Yahoo! boosted its share 1.3% to 28.8%. MSN-Microsoft's share was steady at 12.8%, Tim Warner up 0.3% to 5.9%.

Erick Schonfeld over at Business 2.0 Blog has been busy digging up the details on Amazonâ??s new UnBox movie download service. The details are on the Business 2.0 Blog. Amazon is apparently using Microsoftâ??s Windows Media Player, Digital Rights Management (DRM) and related technologies.

The Internet search giant said such phrases were potentially damaging to its brand.

"We think it's important to make the distinction between using the word 'Google' to describe using Google to search the Internet and using the word 'google' to generally describe searching the Internet. It has some serious trademark issues," a representative for the search company said.

Julie Coleman, an authority on linguistics from the University of Leicester, said she could understand Google's concerns.

"The prestige associated with a trademark is lost if people use it generically, so I do see Google's point. They also do lots more than just search, so maybe they're reluctant for their brand name to be restricted in this way," Coleman said.

But Coleman added that once new words enter into common usage, it is impossible to stop their use.

"Google can't possibly stop the spread of the verb," Coleman said. "Normal people are using it in normal conversation and in writing, and they aren't likely to face legal proceedings."

What Google could do, said Coleman, is "force dictionaries to mention its origin in a trademarked brand name, which is what the Oxford English Dictionary already does."

It is true that brand building has more to do with wide recognition of the brand than anything else, and recognition of the brand with what it stands for. If thanda matlab Coca cola, why does google not want to associate Google with search? Isn't it what it means? What more would a brand manager love than for the brand it is promoting to be used as a generic verb that has been added to the Oxford Dictionary?

But of course, you are right! Search is just of the things that google does. It is true that Google still is the numero uno in search, and that many people clicks those sponsored links on the SERP, it is also a fact that Google made almost a Billion from its adsense program last year which has nothing to do with googling. Google is a Phenomenon, not even just a media company, as manyclaims. Google is everything but a search engine, it just happens to own the best search engine today!

I spent my early years of schooling at ISKCON, that is International Society For Krsna CONsciousness for the Uninitiated, and have fond memories of the same. It was shock and then despair when I heard that some terrorist group had thrown a powerful bomb amidst a crowd at ISKCON that had come to watch the famous Raas Leela performed for the Janmasthami. Militants in Manipur had mostly avoided hurting civilians as collateral damage, except as exttortion related killings. This Bomb Blast was also extortion related, claims some, and has pointed finger at a certain terrorist group. But it was most shameful.

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Blogger.com, one of the trailblazers of blogging, is about to undergo a substantial upgrade that will improve its usability and help it catch up to the state of the art. General Lethargy, and link love made me stick to Blogger despite several temptations to switch to Wordpress. Another reason for those temptations was the tags and categories. New Blogger will be integrating tags, the UI will be more intuitive. I don't care much about privacy since I am from the other school... Just another reason to stick to Blogger for my existing blogs. I will be starting a blog on WP too, though.

Monday, August 14, 2006

Move over teens, make room for more grannies! Youtube user Geriatric1927, by the name Peter, is the latest star in youtube, and has become a favorite granny. Like one user commented, "I don't have a grandpa, but if I could choose, I'd want you to be mine!".

Fox Entertainment Group is planning to distribute movies and TV shows to consumers from the company's network of Internet sites, including MySpace.com.

Fox, a division of News Corp., is expected to announce Monday that digital versions of TV shows such as "24" and "Prison Break," along with feature films, including "X-Men: The Last Stand," will eventually be available for download at Fox sites. Movies will go for $19.99 while TV episodes will cost $1.99.

Sunday, August 13, 2006

It can't get more ruuged than The Gobook XR-1 from Itronix. The screen can be dimmed to a level that looks completely dark, but that can be read with night-vision goggles. The notebook can be fully submerged and is designed to survive a fire. If it's cold outside, the system warms up the hard drive before it fully boots. And it can find a wireless network almost anywhere in the world with built-in radios for multiple bands of both UMTS/GSM (Universal Mobile Telecommunications Service/Global System for Mobile Communication) and CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) cellular networks, plus Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS (Global Positioning System).[source]

Thursday, August 10, 2006

Look at the adsense ad below or on my side bar, in fact look at any one adsense ad units. Almost every ad units we see are very well blended. Some so well blended, they almost look like just another link. But it seems like a well chosen color scheme for the ad units which will make the ad stand out, can prove more effective, as reported inside google here.

It was all over the web in general and the blogosphere in particular when AOL leaked Google's search data ( AOL uses google for searches, and with the number of users, the sample size can be a very good representation of Google searchers). Even I downloaded the database, and am planning to create a cube to do some nice analytics. Some people had already done very good analytics on the same, and had come up with very good user patterns which can be goldmine to web marketers and some incriminating yet intersting results. But the most horryifying result was when it was found that an user was actually planning to kill his Wife.

Some people might argue about personal freedom and all that, but this is amazing, in a way if you look at it. Minority report is not far behind. With some great analytics and datamining tools available already, this data could really find out search patterns and map them to probable terrorists and Killers.

Hmm!! I need to be very very careful next time I search for some Kinky stuff. Or can i use a proxy??

With the recent $900 Million deal between news corp and Google, you will see a lot more adsense ads now.Perhaps, Myspace thought that if a one man Dating site could make millions of Adsense, why not make a few millions themselves. Is it the end of small players who made their web idea around adsense, or is it a new beginning? Both ways, google will end up being the winner. 100 Billion in market cap already and more heights to climb...

Thursday, August 03, 2006

While you were dreaming about that web 2.0 idea, here is this 24 year old entrepreneur who is making Millions selling Poop, and that too worm poops. His cost is negative because he might get paid for hauling away the garbage, from which he makes the Poops he sell for half a Million last year, and will touch 2 millions this year!

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Windows Live Spaces will now connect to other services to offer a different type of social networking than is available on other sites like MySpace. The service integrates with Live Contacts, which is also used in the Windows Live Messenger product. Instant messaging conversations can now be initiated through the Spaces site.

With these expanded social networking options also comes security concerns, Microsoft acknowledged. To combat this, the Redmond company has added permission features to let users decide how they can be contacted through their Spaces sites. These permissions would be shown beside a user's profile, and can be changed.

Diigo is another new entrant to the already crowded bookmarking toollets' space. I haven't personally checked it out, but read a review and it seems like this new bookmarking tool has some features that del.icio.us and the ilks doesn't have. The review here, states that this is a new bookmarking tool with a difference.

In addition to letting you bookmark pages and share those bookmarks with others, it also lets you highlight parts of pages (text or images), and store those highlight not just in your Diigo account but on the Web pages themselves (if you have the plug-in). You can also attach post-it-like notes to your highlights on Web pages, and they can be private or shared.

In addition to letting you bookmark pages and share those bookmarks with others, it also lets you highlight parts of pages (text or images), and store those highlight not just in your Diigo account but on the Web pages themselves (if you have the plug-in). You can also attach post-it-like notes to your highlights on Web pages, and they can be private or shared.

Something like a mashup of hotmail Bhatia's Blogeverywhere, Stumbleupon and del.icio.us? Wait till I check out!

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

"Japan, which once topped the list of world's fastest supercomputers with NEC's Earth Simulator, has seen its position deteriorate in recent years in the face of faster machines like IBM's 280-teraflop BlueGene/L. Well now it looks like a new Japanese rig is poised to regain the top of the chart with a new petaflop super computer."

We all have, at one point of time, written such a soulful letter. I even coaxed a poetic friend to compose a letter, meant for my 2nd or 3rd flame, when I was 13-14. I am sure she shared the letter with her closest friends. I never got a reply, though, I did, again coax another friend, to ask for her reply.Love letter as we use to call it. There even were self help books on how to write love letters.

Then, the email came, leave aside love letters; we have even stopped writing courteous letters. We write mails these days.And if you write a pathetic love letter, then there is the danger of having I circulated all over the world.The harmless gossip that girls those days did with her sister and friends can now spread like wild fire. What, with chain mails and blogs and RSS.This is what happened to the fate of Joseph Dobbie after his fateful email to Kate Winsall.

But it was a very sincere mail that Dobbie wrote, and he actually doesn’t deserve such sneer from the readers.Rather we should sympathise with Dobbie.For keeping alive, love letters, in this age of email lingo, he deserves a place no lower than Romeo.

This is my sincere plea to Kate, at least have that coffee at Tate Modern’s.He could turn out to be far more romantic than he seemed in his Email.Like he said, to the Metro, 'The e-mail is like me: I don't feel any pressure to conform. I am a a philosopher and a poet,'

Of course he now feels that he stands no chance after the email.'I stood a chance with Kate until the e-mail went round the world. Now there's no way she's going to say yes.'

Now why not?In fact I feel Kate should say Yes.After, all you have through.And Dobbie, it is no time for a tactful retreat, if you think so.I'd say be a Man and go further on!

And I ask everyone, who, instead of laughing at the email, sympathise with Dobbie, to Plea with Kate.Somebody chained mailed me that Today was World Girl Friend's day!Now that was some coincidence!All the best Dobbie!